By SIMON COLLINS, science reporter
Britain's top scientist says the world needs a genetically modified, health-giving "golden apple" to win the case for the new genetic technology.
Lord Robert May, an Australian-born ecologist who is president of the Royal Society of London, was in Auckland yesterday to present the 2001 Rutherford Medal for Science and Technology to the director of the Liggins Institute, Dr Peter Gluckman.
Lord May believes genetic modification of food crops will be necessary to feed the expected increase in the world's population at minimum cost to the environment.
Paradoxically, he favours modifying farming techniques to allow more room for "pests" so as to preserve the earth's biological diversity - yet he also believes that genetic technology is needed to help food crops withstand pests, eliminating the need for environmentally damaging pesticides.
"The first wave [of GM applications] were things which were motivated by the interests of agribusiness," he said.
"I hope to see a second wave where the primary interest is the interests of the consumer and the environment, that gives us the ability to create crops which are salt-tolerant and drought-tolerant, where everyone benefits."
It was not surprising that GM was unpopular because people could see risks without any concrete benefits.
That would change only "when we have a GM golden apple where we can say, eat this apple and you will be healthy and thin".
"There are allergy-free products and cholesterol-free products that offer health benefits," he said.
"In the developing world there are much more concrete things [crops] that specifically engineer in vitamins that are otherwise deficient in the diet of the people, and maybe in the future we will provide a method of engineering in vaccines against childhood illnesses."
Lord May said there were risks of allergies in any new food, but there were "no concrete examples whatsoever" where such allergies had been introduced in genetically modified foods.
As for the risk of genetically modified "super-weeds" driving out natural species, he said this was much less likely than with new species of crops bred by conventional techniques. There was no demonstrated example of it happening through GM.
He considered that the most serious risk with GM was that it would allow a more intense form of farming, with crops made to produce food for humans only and resistant to weeds and pests.
"We should reflect before ramping up yet one more notch in the intensification of agriculture," he said.
The author of several books on extinction, Lord May believes the earth is going through its sixth great episode of extinctions, comparable with the one which wiped out the dinosaurs.
He said the five previous episodes were associated with environmental changes such as the changing configuration of continents. The present episode was unique in being caused by human destruction of natural habitats and over-harvesting of fish and other species.
He advocates setting aside more natural habitats to help species survive because the alternative would be to live in "a greatly impoverished world".
New Zealand's eight fellows of the Royal Society of London were invited to see Lord May present the Rutherford Medal to Dr Gluckman in Auckland last night. The medal is awarded by the Royal Society of NZ to a leading scientist each year.
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